The eruption of anti-immigrant fury over the federal government’s plans to temporarily relocate undocumented Latino children to shelters and Border Patrol facilities in Murietta, California, and other cities, is largely founded on the expressed belief that immigrants bring drugs and crime, threatening the safety of communities.
In past decades, California, New York and Texas’ young Latino men ages 10 to 24 suffered twice the risk of being killed by guns than white, non-Hispanic men aged 40 and older. After enormous population growth, young Hispanic men today are substantially less at risk from guns than older
white men.
The larger political question is: If the nation’s three biggest states all experienced large drops in gun fatalities under radically different gun policies, do gun control laws and gun rights matter?
Perhaps, though not as conventionally thought. Stricter gun-control states regularly have lower firearms death rates than gun-rights states, a pattern the three largest states illustrate. Gun-control New York (5.0 gun deaths per 100,000 population in 2011) and California (8.0 per 100,000) are the safest. Gun-rights Texas remains more dangerous (10.2 per 100,000).
Even in Chicago, gun violence has dropped sharply in recent decades, particularly among young people. It is now at the lowest level in at least 40 years. But, as in most large cities, its most impoverished neighborhoods suffer continued outbreaks of shootings.
Where not subjected to crushing poverty, the new emerging America of more diverse, younger, immigrant and urban populations appears far less fearful, intolerant and enamored with guns. The traditionalists dominating gun and immigrant policy debates should put aside their politics of anger and learn from them.
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